American Military Intervention: A User's Guide

Deciding when, where, and how to intervene with military force
presents a truly perplexing set of questions. In a post-Cold War
world, with no overriding threat to serve as the focus for American
national strategy, it is even more difficult to decide when, where,
and how to use the U.S.'s limited military resources. In this
increasingly uncertain world, it is therefore imperative that
American policymakers follow clear guidelines in deciding where and
when American military intervention is most needed and how it can
be most effective.

Unfortunately, however, the United States currently has no such
guidelines in place. Because of this, the Clinton Administration
has been tempted to intervene militarily in peripheral areas of the
world. In Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, the result has been either
failure or settlements that even one former Clinton advisor has
characterized as "provisional, fragile, and
reversible."1 Moreover, congressional and public support
has been very weak because it has been unclear to most Americans
how these interventions serve the national interest.

America will continue to squander its military resources on such
inconclusive and tangential operations unless the Clinton
Administration and Congress adopt a concrete set of policy
guidelines for when and how to use American military forces abroad.
These guidelines must be flexible enough to address a wide range of
military options, but they also must be constant enough to balance
the projected benefit of any intervention against the costs to the
American people.

Before approving any future military intervention, the
Administration and Congress therefore should make certain that it
meets the following criteria:

Criterion #1 - Military intervention should defend national
security interests. Both the President and Congress must
recognize that not all national interests are equally important.
They must also acknowledge that not all national interests are
national security interests that require military intervention.
Instead of focusing on core security interests, the Clinton
Administration has committed American military power only on the
periphery, and with inconclusive and negligible results. The
Administration has what one critic has called an "instinct for the
capillary" -- a tendency to send U.S. troops on missions that serve
lesser national interests, or in some cases (such as Haiti and
Somalia), no security interest at all.2 For America to
use its power effectively, it must prioritize where and how it
chooses to defend its vital, important, and marginal interests,
thereby avoiding both excessive activism that diffuses important
resources and isolationism that eschews important opportunities to
shape events.

Criterion #2 - Military intervention should not jeopardize
the ability of the U.S. to meet more important security
commitments. America's current national military strategy is
strategically bankrupt. Not only is the Bottom-Up Review force too
small to execute the two major regional conflicts strategy, but it
is woefully underfunded as well. Huge interventions in areas of
marginal security interest have exacerbated the strain on the U.S.
military and made it doubtful that the military can mobilize the
resources necessary to defend vital national interests and honor
current security commitments.

Criterion #3 - Military intervention should strive to achieve
military goals that are clearly defined, decisive, attainable, and
sustainable. Military interventions should be conducted to
accomplish clearly definable military goals that are militarily
achievable, consistent with overriding political objectives, and
supported by enough force to achieve these goals. In Bosnia, the
Clinton Administration has failed to define these military
objectives clearly, and those objectives that have been articulated
are insufficient to achieve the larger political goal of reaching a
sustainable peace. Thus, there is no reliable way to measure
success or failure, which is why Clinton has imposed a deadline for
the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The President, in effect, has made
withdrawing U.S. forces on schedule the only clear-cut,
identifiable U.S. military goal in Bosnia.

Criterion #4 - Military intervention should enjoy
congressional and public support. President Clinton has made a
habit of circumventing Congress in deciding to undertake military
interventions. In non-emergency contingencies like Haiti and
Bosnia, Congress should have the opportunity to vote on the merits
of an intervention, not merely whether to support American troops
already on the ground. Such decisions should not be made by polls;
Americans traditionally are reluctant to intervene. However, when
intervention is required, the President should mobilize public
support (as President Bush did during the Persian Gulf War) so that
American troops abroad will know that the nation and the Congress
support not only the troops, but the actual goals of the
operation.

Criterion #5 - The armed forces must be allowed to create the
conditions for success. The U.S. armed forces must be allowed
the operational freedom to create the conditions within which they
can succeed. The U.S. military should never be placed in a
situation where it has no control over the outcome, as was the case
in both Haiti and Bosnia.

Fortunately, Congress can help redress the policy shortcomings
of the Clinton Administration. First, it should ask the President
to issue a presidential directive that establishes these five
criteria for military interventions. This would add to the
Administration's presidential decision directive concerning
multilateral peace operations (PDD-25), which was limited to
guidelines for U.S. participation in peacekeeping. Congress also
should require that the National Security Strategy, an annual
report by the President to Congress, contain:

A prioritization of national interests and national
security interests;

A listing of criteria, such as those listed here, that
will give guidelines for when, where, whether, and how the U.S.
military should conduct military interventions;

A set of criteria for deciding when and in what capacity
the U.S. will participate in multilateral military operations
through coalitions, alliances, and other structures such as the
United Nations;

An unequivocal guarantee that the President will consult
Congress before launching military interventions that are not
national emergencies; and

A declaration that U.S. military forces in interventions
abroad will have clearly defined, decisive, and attainable military
objectives that can be achieved through proven military
doctrine.

THE NEED FOR CRITERIA

Few issues of foreign and military policy are as vexing for the
policymaker as military intervention. The problem of finding
reliable criteria for deciding when, where, why, and how to
intervene abroad with military force is made particularly difficult
by several factors. First, there is the character of the "new world
disorder," a volatile and unpredictable international arena that
does not lend itself to conceptual or strategic clarity. On the one
hand, there is no one clear and present danger on which to base a
coherent strategy; on the other hand, the many lesser threats to
American interests, like those posed by such rogue states as North
Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya, cannot be ignored. These threats are
more than enough reason for maintaining forces capable of many
different levels of military intervention.

The second factor that complicates operating in this world
disorder is a dilemma in the way Americans think about military
intervention. Henry Kissinger has aptly described this dilemma and
the solution that is needed:

America's dominant task is to strike a balance between the twin
temptations inherent in its exceptionalism: the notion that America
must remedy every wrong and stabilize every dislocation, and the
latent instinct to withdraw into itself. Indiscriminate involvement
in all the ethnic turmoil and civil wars of the post-Cold War world
would drain a crusading America. Yet an America that confines
itself to the refinement of its domestic virtues would, in the end,
abdicate America's security and prosperity to decisions made by
other societies in faraway places and over which America would
progressively lose control. Not every evil can be combated by
America, even less by America alone. But some monsters need to be,
if not slain, at least resisted. What is most needed are criteria
for selectivity.3

The Clinton Administration has failed to put forth such
selective criteria for military intervention: when and why it
should take place, and how it should be carried out.4
Instead of offering a sensible strategy that sets strategic
priorities and matches America's means to her most important
foreign policy objectives, the Administration has concentrated on
marginal "feel-good" operations on the periphery of U.S. national
interests. While neglecting the core priorities of American foreign
policy, the Administration has squandered American resources on
interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia -- military operations
in which the claimed successes are both transient and easily
overturned.

Professor Michael Mandelbaum, a former Clinton advisor, writes
that President Clinton has intervened on the periphery in "social
work" at the expense of successfully managing relations with other
great powers -- the core concern of U.S. foreign
policy.5 Nothing demonstrates the validity of this
argument better than the continued insistence of Administration
officials that Bosnia is a conflict "raging at the heart of
Europe." Bosnia is indeed a European security problem, but hardly
one that threatens to overwhelm the continent. It needs attention,
but not the same sort of military attention given by America to
Europe as a result of the hegemonic designs of Germany and the
Soviet Union in the past. Americans deserve a foreign policy that
is shorter on such rhetoric and longer on rational discourse about
core and peripheral interests. Such discourse is needed to promote
consensus and understanding about where, when, and how America
should intervene.

Because the United States is the world's leading power, U.S.
leaders must shape events and not be shaped by them. In Bosnia,
however, President Clinton portrayed American leadership as a
fateful burden that has painted America into a corner as the leader
of the NATO implementation force (IFOR). Assistant Secretary of
State Richard Holbrooke has stated that "we did not choose this as
the test case.... [N]obody wanted it to happen, but that is the
hand history has dealt us. The U.S. role in Europe and NATO's
future and our bilateral relationships with all the major countries
in Europe are all going to be determined by
Bosnia."6

In other words, the U.S. has no control over its own destiny in
Bosnia or Europe, and leadership simply means accepting the many
bad options presented by European and Administration
indecisiveness. In addition, such a statement means surrendering
America's right to help shape the future of Europe and instead
allowing the American role in Europe to be determined by local
factions in Bosnia. This is hardly leadership. America leads
because of the conditions leadership engenders, conditions that are
favorable to the U.S. and its allies. Leadership is a means to an
end, not an end in itself.

By failing to lead and shape events in Bosnia, the U.S. has
relegated itself to the role of medium-sized player in a peripheral
European security affair. The Administration has put aside the
larger questions, such as NATO's expansion, in favor of a one-year
peace implementation mission in Bosnia. More important, it has tied
the measure of American power and successful foreign policy in the
world to insignificant operations that the President claims are
"test cases" of American leadership. The danger, as one analyst has
noted, is that "it is surely perilous to think of the Balkans as an
'acid test,' 'test case,' or a 'defining moment' for anything. We
have already seen what devastating effect such manufactured
challenges can have on Western unity."7

The United States needs a military intervention policy that is
consistent with America's role as the greatest power in the world
today. Such a policy would be based on the need to protect and
defend America's national security interests through a range of
military options, including deterrence, preventive attacks,
warfighting, diplomacy, and even peace operations. An intervention
policy should discriminate between America's interests and how best
to defend them so that America's limited military resources will be
used where they are most needed and most effective and not wasted
on inconsequential operations of little lasting significance.

THE INTERVENTION DEBATE8

The Clinton Administration has acted without an effective
doctrine for military intervention. Clinton's national strategy of
"Engagement and Enlargement," for example, offers more in the way
of academic abstractions than discriminating policy guidance.

This reluctance to provide useful criteria for military
intervention comes on the heels of long-standing debate. Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger was attacked in 1984, from both the
left and the right, for proposing criteria that were perceived as
too restrictive. Weinberger proposed six conditions for military
intervention:

Vital national interests are threatened,

The U.S. clearly intends to win,

The intervention has precisely defined political and military
objectives,

There is reasonable assurance that intervention will be
supported by the American people and Congress,

The commitment of American forces and their objectives can be
reassessed constantly and adjusted if necessary, and

The commitment of U.S. forces to combat is undertaken as a last
resort.9

Critics maintained that Weinberger's criteria were a
prescription for inaction, arguing that America's military options
in many cases would not be clear-cut enough to support their
application. In addition to the expected attacks from the left,
critics ranging from Secretary of State George Shultz to
conservative commentators and National Review magazine
claimed that the Weinberger criteria were simply unobtainable in
many instances in which the U.S. would want to entertain limited
military action. Newspaper columnist William Safire echoed the
sentiments of many when he wrote that Weinberger would restrict the
U.S. to "only the fun wars."10

From the military's point of view, however, the Weinberger
doctrine was meant to guarantee that the U.S. would not repeat the
strategic mistakes of the Vietnam War and the failed Lebanese
intervention of 1982-1983. In both of those cases, there was no
clear intention of winning despite the sacrifices being made; there
was tenuous public and congressional support; and the military and
political objectives were never clearly defined, attainable, or
decisive. The Vietnam syndrome was, in essence, the understandable
desire on the part of America's military that their sacrifices not
be in vain. As the post-Vietnam military sought to rebuild the
strategic ethos, one officer wrote that "when it comes to being
engaged in any undertaking where political objectives are hazy,
public support only tepid, the prospects for a rapid decision
remote, and the risk of substantial casualties high, service
opinion is unanimous: count us out."11

It therefore came as no surprise when General Colin Powell, who
had been a young infantry officer in Vietnam, bolstered the
Weinberger doctrine while serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. Powell weighed in with even more explicit guidance as to
how military force should be used in interventions.12 In
particular, he wished to reinvigorate the strategic link: closely
matching military goals to political objectives. And, as is well
known, he favored using overwhelming force to guarantee that
objectives would be reached at minimum cost in American lives. This
was very much the philosophy in the Gulf War, where Powell stated
that his strategy left nothing to chance; the U.S. military was
"not operating in the margin" and would "win
decisively."13

Despite the resounding victory in the Persian Gulf, critics
still openly questioned the utility of the Weinberger-Powell
doctrines as guidelines for the use of force, especially in
other-than-war military interventions such as peacekeeping. The
late Congressman and Defense Secretary Les Aspin and others said
that Weinberger-Powell left the policymaker with only two options:
all or nothing. Aspin postulated that with the end of the zero-sum
game of Cold War superpower rivalry, the U.S. should adopt a more
flexible approach to military intervention. Knowing that military
power was a blunt instrument, he also hoped that new military
technologies (such as precision guided munitions) would help to
provide the U.S. with more precise and flexible tools that could be
used in limited military interventions without mobilizing public
and congressional support or using overwhelming military
force.14

The Clinton Administration's early position on intervention was
couched in light of its doctrine of "assertive multilateralism" and
addressed only peace operations. The Administration hoped that U.S.
military intervention could be conducted mainly through such
multilateral institutions as the United Nations. However, the
failure of the U.N. mission to Somalia and the shocking deaths of
U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu street battles prompted President
Clinton's security team to rethink their criteria for participation
in U.N. operations. The result was Presidential Decision Directive
25 (PDD-25), a document that set intervention criteria solidly in
the tradition of prudence and caution started by Caspar Weinberger.
PDD-25, published in May 1994, set out eight criteria for the U.S.
to consider when deciding to support a peace operation, six further
restrictions for U.S. participation should American troops be
involved, and an additional three if there was a strong possibility
of combat.15

Despite this note of caution, however, the restrictive criteria
of PDD-25 did not prevent the Clinton Administration from
undertaking a peace enforcement mission in Haiti; U.N. peacekeeping
in Haiti, Rwanda, and Macedonia; and the NATO peace implementation
mission in Bosnia. In these interventions, the cautionary criteria
of PDD-25 were ignored. Given the controversies over Somalia,
Haiti, and Bosnia, it was obvious that there was little desire in
the Administration to set criteria, let alone to comply with
guidelines when they were set.

In March 1996, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake further
contributed to the atmosphere of uncertainty in a speech at George
Washington University in which he proposed seven broad
circumstances that "may call for the use of force or our military
forces."16 These circumstances included:

To defend against direct attacks on the U.S., its citizens, and
its allies;

To counter aggression;

To defend key economic interests;

To preserve, promote, and defend democracy;

To prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction,
terrorism, international crime, and drug trafficking;

To maintain U.S. reliability; and

For humanitarian purposes.17

This was an attempt to answer "why" and "when" the U.S. might
conduct a military intervention. However, Lake's list is not
specific enough to serve as a useful guideline for military
intervention. For instance, stating that the U.S. will use force
"to counter aggression" is strategically meaningless. It assumes
that aggression everywhere, large or small, may require the use of
American military force.

Lake's list can hardly be used to provide constructive guidance
on "where" and "whether" to intervene. In addition, the question of
"how" must be addressed, as it significantly affects all the other
questions. Americans need a clearer set of criteria for military
interventions -- which, while not necessarily identical to the
Weinberger or Powell criteria, nevertheless are well within the
tradition which they established. These criteria are:

Criterion #1
Military intervention should defend national security
interests.

The essence of American statecraft today consists of being able
to discriminate among competing national interests and then balance
these interests against the willingness of the U.S. to defend them.
Otherwise, America risks squandering its power by failing to
differentiate between vital interests and others that are merely
important or marginal. Without strategic priorities, the U.S. will
be left rudderless in the post-Cold War era, lurching from one
media-generated crisis to another and vacillating between the
extremes of mindless interventionism and rigid isolationism.

The United States today has a limited pool of resources to use
for military interventions. These resources are manifested in
tangible forms (for example, number of troops, carrier battle
groups, or fighter wings) or intangible forms (public support,
willingness to sacrifice). America must use these resources wisely,
only where American action is most needed and most effective.
Devising criteria for military intervention requires a methodology
to establish priorities among America's interests in the
world.18 It is not enough to develop a laundry list of
national interests and assert that they are all equally
important.

America's national interests vary not only in degree of
importance, but also in the types of military interventions
necessary to defend them. Vital national interests (a term
often used but not universally understood) are interests essential
to the continued existence and well-being of America as a free and
prosperous nation. They also are national security interests:
Threats to vital interests threaten the security of the United
States. Therefore, the United States should be willing to go to war
to defend these interests, and should consider all manner of
military intervention in order to uphold them. In contrast to
Weinberger's criteria, military force in defense of vital national
interests should not necessarily be used only as a last resort;
many times it will be more effective when used as a first resort.
Vital national interests include:

Protecting America's territory, borders, and
airspace;

Preventing a major power threat to Europe, East Asia, or
the Persian Gulf;

Preventing hostile interference by an outside power in
the Western Hemisphere;

Ensuring access to foreign trade and resources; and

Protecting Americans, at home and abroad, against
threats to their lives and well-being.

Important national interests are those which are less
than vital but important enough to warrant major diplomatic,
economic, or possibly limited military intervention. This
recognizes the need for more flexibility than given by the
Weinberger doctrine. In the post-Cold War world, with its lesser
but more nebulous threats, the U.S. must be prepared to use limited
force in defense of national security interests that are not vital
national interests. Important interests are are not always national
security interests, however, because not all threats to the
security of the U.S. can be addressed through military means.
Important national interests include general stability in Europe,
the Middle East, and East Asia, as well as promoting more open
trade arrangements with Japan and China, promoting democracy and
stability in areas such as the former Soviet Union, and combating
terrorism and the flow of illegal drugs into America. As a rule,
military intervention should be considered as a last resort in
defending most of these interests. In most cases, diplomatic and
economic efforts will be more effective.

Marginal interests are national interests, but rarely
national security interests, and should not be high on the list of
priorities that require the commitment of America's military
resources. Marginal interests include political stability and
economic development in many parts of the developing world,
humanitarian concerns, and environmental issues. These interests
also should be considered marginal from a military perspective
because they tend to involve the sorts of problems that do not lend
themselves to military solutions, especially when imposed by an
outside force. For instance, the attempts by U.S. and U.N. military
forces at coercive disarmament, political reconciliation, and
nation-building in Somalia backfired. Problems of economic and
political development, humanitarian crises, and environmental
concerns only rarely are susceptible to a military solution.
Lasting solutions to these problems most often come from within and
are best supported by diplomatic or economic programs.

While policymakers must always weigh other considerations, such
as moral and legal factors, calculations of national interest must
always be their principal focus in setting priorities for military
intervention. Moral considerations, media pressure, and legal
prerogatives do not always give policymakers a clear sense of the
value of a national interest to America and what Americans will be
ready to sacrifice for that interest.

For instance, moral outrage and disturbing media images fueled
President Bush's decision to conduct a limited humanitarian relief
effort in Somalia. Moral considerations and vague internationalist
ideals also drove President Clinton to continue the Somalia
operation and expand its goals to include political reconciliation
and nation-building. However, these moral motivations never gave
either President a sense of what the Somalia effort was worth to
the American people. In the end, 18 American soldiers killed on
October 3, 1993, turned out to be too much for America. The result
was a humiliating withdrawal because of a miscalculation over value
and the threshold of national sacrifice. The Somalia episode showed
the transient and ephemeral nature of national interests generated
by the media or academic abstractions about the new world
order.

Moral umbrage, media-generated urgency, and offense taken from
legal transgressions all combine to add pressure for military
intervention. Naturally, the policymaker needs to consider all
these factors. However, only calculations of national interest,
based on the prosperity and well-being of America and her allies,
can measure accurately what the American people will sacrifice to
see the intervention through to a conclusion. As former National
Security Council official Richard Haass writes, "the ability to
sustain an intervention over time, and, more importantly, despite
human and financial costs, is linked directly to the perceived
importance of the interests at stake."19

Criterion #2
Military intervention should not jeopardize the ability of the U.S.
to meet more important security commitments.

The U.S. is operating with an enormous gap between its national
objectives and its military means to achieve them. The gap between
security commitments and actual forces is exacerbated by the fact
that even the inadequate force of the Clinton Administration's
Bottom-Up Review is underfunded by some $150 billion over the next
five years.20 In the meantime, while drastically cutting
America's armed forces by some 35 percent, the Administration has
used what is left for tangential peace operations in Somalia,
Haiti, and Bosnia: missions where the reward for the U.S.'s
military efforts are tenuous, indecisive, and easily
reversible.

The current national security strategy ostensibly is predicated
on fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous major regional
conflicts (MRCs). While President Clinton maintains that "the
forces the Administration fields today are sufficient to defeat
aggression in two nearly simultaneous major regional
conflicts,"21 most experts disagree.22 More
damaging is the assessment of the uniformed military, those who
actually will have to carry out the Clinton strategy with
inadequate resources. General Ronald Fogleman, the Air Force Chief
of Staff, has testified before the House National Security
Committee that the service chiefs "had made no secret of the fact
that we have never had the force structure that was called for...
to execute the two-MRC strategy."23

This strategic bankruptcy, exacerbated by military interventions
in areas of marginal strategic importance, violates what the great
American foreign policy thinker Walter Lippman called "the
controlling principle" of strategy: that a nation should keep its
goals within its means and should never make commitments without
providing the resources necessary to achieve them. For the United
States, this means ensuring that the shrinking military forces of
the U.S. are trained, ready, and postured to defend the national
security interests of the U.S.

The primary mission of the U.S. armed forces should be to fight
and win the nation's wars, although this obviously does not mean
that war is their only task. In fact, of the over 250 military
interventions carried out by the U.S. since 1789, only five have
been declared wars.24 In the post-Cold War world, the
U.S. military must be prepared for all manner of military
interventions, including limited conventional warfare (Panama 1989
and Desert Storm), punitive airstrikes (Libya 1986 and Iraq 1993),
deterrence (Kuwait 1994), shows of force (Persian Gulf 1988 and
Philippines 1989), and support for peace operations (when their
goals are clearly defined and they serve the national interest).
However, two critical points must instruct the wide range of
possible interventions.

The first is common sense: Forces intervening somewhere are not
available elsewhere. Nor are they training. Congressman Ike Skelton
(D-MO) has noted that "peace-keeping commitments may so degrade the
armed forces' warfighting capability that it will be impossible to
carry out the national military strategy."25 His
findings are supported by the General Accounting Office, which has
found that even small combat units returning from peace operations
need up to six months of recovery time to train back up to
warfighting standards; larger units (such as divisions) need
more.26 This means that because the Bosnian peace
implementation force requires so many resources from the 1st
Armored and 3rd Infantry Divisions, the U.S. Army in Europe is
unable to meet the Army's standards of warfighting readiness for
one to two years. It also means that the shrinking forces of the
U.S. are finding it difficult to keep up with their many security
commitments.27

The second point must always underpin American military
strategy: Focus on warfighting and keep America's powder dry to
protect vital security interests. Lieutenant General Wesley Clark,
the Joint Chiefs' strategic planner, knows that the U.S. armed
forces may be called upon to conduct many types of limited
interventions in defense of less important interests. He notes that
"American military power need not, and indeed, must not, be
reserved for use only in cases of vital interests."28
However, it is equally true that military interventions in support
of peripheral interests should never come at the expense of an
American military force trained for and capable of protecting vital
interests: a perilous situation that many believe the U.S. is
rapidly approaching today. As Colin Powell stated shortly before he
retired,

we can modify our doctrine,
we can modify our strategy, we can modify our structure, our
equipment, our training, our leadership techniques, everything else
to do these other missions, but we never want to do it in such a
way that we lose sight of the focus of why you have armed forces --
to fight and win the nation's wars.29

The U.S. must act like a great power and use its military forces
where the American role is unique and decisive. The U.S. must
concentrate its diplomatic, economic, and military efforts on its
core interests: relations with other great powers and preventing
major conflicts between them. For instance, America's military role
in NATO is to prevent the domination of Europe by a hostile power
or bloc of powers. This is a role that no other nation in the world
can play. Consequently, an America with security commitments all
over the world cannot be expected to play the principal military
role in every local security crisis that does not threaten the
basic security of the European continent.30 As Richard
Haass has written, "there is little reason for U.S. involvement in
peacekeeping, a mission that can be readily undertaken by the
forces of many countries."31

Criterion #3
Military intervention should strive to achieve military goals that
are clearly defined, decisive, attainable, and sustainable.

Interventions must always be driven by political and military
objectives that will define success or failure in an operation.
More important, military objectives must support the political
objective. In Vietnam, the numerous battlefield victories achieved
by American and South Vietnamese forces made little difference to
the political outcome of the conflict. In order to correct that
incoherence in America's Vietnam strategy, the U.S. military now
specifies in campaign plans exactly how military achievements will
produce the political success of an operation. This is what the
Weinberger doctrine meant by "winning." For instance, in the Gulf
War, the military objective was to expel the Iraqi Army from in and
around Kuwait. When the U.S. military accomplished that task on the
battlefield, the political objective was also ensured: Kuwait was
liberated and its national sovereignty restored.

For military objectives to contribute to the political goal of
an intervention, they must be clearly defined, decisive, and
attainable. In some American interventions, the military was not
given a clearly defined objective whose attainment could be
measured. For instance, in Lebanon in 1982-1983, the U.S. Marines
in Beirut were asked to "establish a presence." This objective was
ambiguous, indecisive, and unsustainable, and made little
contribution to the political goal of stabilizing Beirut and
Lebanon. In Somalia, the initial mission to provide humanitarian
relief was clearly defined, and the U.S. military was able to
measure its success. However, the mission of nation-building could
not be supported by unambiguous and conclusive military missions.
As a result, the U.N. force never defined the criteria for its
success in Somalia, and the military forces were left to hope that
an incoherent campaign of partial disarmament and the fact of their
presence would make political reconciliation possible. There was no
direct connection between military goals and political objectives,
only an oblique influence on political events by various military
activities.

Working toward clearly defined goals may seem a rather obvious
point, but it has been violated consistently by the Clinton
Administration. Lacking clear military and political objectives for
his military options, Clinton has fallen back on setting deadlines
for troop withdrawal as the only objective that is both clearly
defined and attainable. In short, Clinton has substituted
time-driven objectives for event-driven objectives. This violates
the profound military dictum of Clausewitz that "No one starts a
war -- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so -- without
first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve and how he
intends to conduct it."32

In contrast, for the Clinton Administration it is enough that an
intervention endure for a certain period of time. Bosnia is case in
point. The Administration has not given the military an objective
the achievement of which would signal the end of the mission and
the accomplishment of something important -- an exit strategy.
Instead, President Clinton has offered an exit date and stated that
the U.S. military effort in Bosnia will last "about a year."
Therefore, U.S. troops will pull out of Bosnia regardless of
whether they achieve any other objectives. In other words, the
"exit strategy is the mission. That is, the mission is to show up
and leave, not to stay until the [unstated] goals are fully
achieved."33 Some critics have maintained that this lack
of strategy is intentional because if a goal is never set, Clinton
cannot be accused of not reaching it. Exit dates, in fact, are
foolproof; time always marches on. Supporting the realization of
the Dayton Peace Accords -- the vaguely stated goal of the mission
in Bosnia -- may not be achieved, but the goal of withdrawing U.S.
troops can be.

Time-driven interventions are the de facto strategy of
this Administration because it cannot find achievable and
sustainable military goals in its ill-defined and ambiguous
interventions. In his March 1996 address on intervention, Anthony
Lake stressed the Administration's emphasis on schedules and
deadlines rather than objectives: In Haiti and Bosnia, "for these
operations to succeed, tightly tailored military missions and sharp
withdrawal deadlines must be the norm." Lake has been forced to
rely on deadlines and timelines because the Administration is
intervening in peripheral conflicts that cannot long sustain the
support of the American people and their Congress.

If the American people thought the Bosnian intervention was
really as profoundly critical to the security of Europe as the
Administration pretends, the effort would be worth doing for more
than "about a year." The American public has supported U.S.
involvement in NATO for 47 years but is skeptical about Bosnia.
This inconsistency between rhetoric and commitment illustrates the
Administration's failure to measure the real value of marginal
national interests. The President's pollsters know that weak public
support for inconsequential interventions can be somewhat
ameliorated by deadlines, regardless of mission accomplishment.
They also know that if the going gets rough, they can pull out the
troops and argue that nothing much was lost anyway --precisely
because Americans know that no vital interests were at stake.

This is a gross misuse of American military power. When the U.S.
military is committed to an intervention, it must be given goals
whose success can be measured clearly. If policymakers do not set
clearly defined military and political objectives, they will tend
to choose, as in Vietnam, plans that are politically controllable
over plans that will be militarily and politically
successful.34 This is the case in Bosnia. The military
plan is controllable, but whether it will be successful is out of
the military's hands. As a result, there is no guarantee that the
year spent in Bosnia will achieve anything of note.35
Ultimately, the goal of the U.S. military is to be persuasive in
peace and decisive in war. To satisfy both conditions, it needs
clearly defined and decisive objectives in all interventions.

Criterion #4
Military intervention should enjoy congressional and public
support.

The role of Congress in foreign policy and defense today is
certainly not what the framers of the U.S. Constitution intended.
During the past three years, Congress has been marginalized and
unable to vote on the merits of a military intervention. This
condition was fostered during the Cold War and exacerbated by the
necessity that the President be able to act with secrecy,
expediency, and continuity of purpose. However, neither Somalia,
nor Haiti, nor Bosnia represented a critical emergency or imminent
threat to national security. There was time for debate about ends
and means, costs and benefits, and the role of American military
force in the world. Congress must reinvigorate its constitutional
role by reasserting its decision-making powers concerning military
intervention without infringing on the President's ability to act
decisively in a crisis.

In both Haiti and Bosnia, President Clinton committed large
numbers of U.S. combat forces without the approval of Congress. In
fact, in both instances, the President obtained the authorization
of the U.N. Security Council before asking the U.S. Congress for
its support. In the debate over the Bosnian intervention, by the
time Congress was prepared to vote, the vote was no longer about
the value and efficacy of the intervention itself. Rather, it was
about upholding a President that already had committed American
troops and American prestige. Having painted Congress into a
corner, the President won the vote to uphold American credibility
and support American troops. Even so, the House of Representatives
voted 287-141 to condemn the mission while expressing support for
the troops. The Senate voted 69-30 to stand by the troops but "not
endorse the President's decision [or] the agreement reached in
Dayton."

Similarly, in the first months of his Administration, the
President expanded the U.S. role in Somalia and pushed the United
Nations to take on a more ambitious mandate. Congress never
approved this plan, and when 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in
Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) led the
successful effort to cut off funds for the mission and force a
unilateral U.S. withdrawal from Somalia by March 1994. Not having
consulted Congress before changing the nature of the Somalia
intervention, President Clinton could not gauge the inherent value
of the mission to Congress and the American people. Committing U.S.
troops and national prestige to interventions when Congress is
unsupportive and the national will is not engaged weakens American
credibility abroad.

There has always been tension between the Congress and the
President over foreign policy, and military intervention in
particular. The framers of the Constitution clearly intended both
the legislative and executive branches to have a role beyond one
branch's rubber-stamping the unilateral actions of the other. The
system delineated by the framers was to have Congress declare war
(Article I, Section 8) and the President wage war (Article II,
Section 2). But since modern convention is for nations to resort to
the force of arms without declaring war, this system of checks and
balances has broken down. And yet, as Professor Chistopher Layne
recently noted, "as the embodiment of the American people's
political will, Congress has a legitimate role in deciding whether
U.S. troops participate in global military
interventions."36

The American people must be involved in supporting significant
military interventions, and this requires the support of Congress
as well. If an intervention is not supported by the public, it can
collapse after minimum resistance and a few American casualties.
This is not to say that Americans are intolerant of casualties
incurred in military interventions, but they will not tolerate
losses in interventions that do not have clear goals and readily
apparent benefits that are worth the cost in blood and treasure. As
strategist Harry Summers has written, "casualties per se are not
the limiting factor. It is whether those casualties are
disproportionate to the value of the mission."37 This
proposition is supported by a recent sociological study of public
opinion during the Lebanon and Somalia interventions. The study
showed that public approval of some interventions "is not
conditioned by a knee-jerk reaction to casualties. Judging from the
responses we have seen to Lebanon and Somalia, it is conditioned
rather by the demand that casualties be incurred for some clear and
worthy purpose."38 If the mission appears to be
worthless, the tolerance for casualties will be low.

The decision to undertake a military intervention cannot be made
by polling or by having 535 Members of Congress act as national
security advisors. Traditionally, the American public and Congress
are reluctant to intervene. Presidential leadership can make a
significant difference in building a case for intervention,
however. President George Bush worked assiduously for months to
rally Congress and the public behind Operation Desert Storm. Even
then, not a single member of the Democratic leadership in either
the House or the Senate voted in favor of the Desert Storm
resolution.

Congress and the American public should be involved in voting on
the merits of any American military intervention, and it is the
task of the President to seek that consensus. Only when the nation
is solidly behind an intervention can the U.S. hope to sustain
credible military efforts abroad.

Criterion #5
The armed forces must be allowed to create the conditions for
success.

The U.S. should use its military forces for objectives that can
be achieved decisively, and that are politically decisive as well.
This does not mean saving the U.S. military for just "the big
ones," as some critics charge. Limited interventions done properly,
such as the 1986 F-111 raid on Tripoli in Libya, can have a
decisive effect. However, in limited interventions, there is often
the temptation to restrict military requirements because the
purpose is to send a political signal. This happened in 1979 when
Iran was threatening Saudi Arabia. Embarrassingly, it was revealed
that the F-15s which President Carter sent to help defend Saudi
Arabia were unarmed. It was an empty political signal that could
have been a military disaster. If U.S. combat forces are to be used
in any intervention, their operations must be completely consistent
with the proven operational doctrine of the United States military.
This allows the U.S. armed forces to create and control the
conditions for their success, no matter how big or small the tasks
and the stakes.

Strategy is the art of using military means to achieve political
ends. A coherent strategy ensures that the armed forces have
objectives that, once attained, contribute directly to the desired
political solution. These military objectives must be clearly
defined, attainable, decisive, and consistent with military
doctrine. In other words, the military should be given goals that
it understands, that it can reach through methods for which it is
well-trained, and that will make a difference once attained. From a
military perspective, the most sought-after strategy would be
similar to that used in the Gulf War, in which President Bush
formulated "clear-cut and attainable political objectives; and the
armed forces achieved those objectives through rapid and decisive
military action."39 While this formula is not always so
easily achieved in limited military interventions, the policymaker
should strive to replicate it as much as possible.

The U.S. military prefers rapid and decisive action because it
delivers results. Not only is overwhelming force and decisive
action consistent with the greatest success, but it tends to be the
least costly way to fight. In any intervention, the military wants
to keep the initiative. The actions of U.S. forces, not others,
should dictate the pace of events and the outcome. Even in limited
interventions, the use of overwhelming force helps American forces
keep the initiative and create the conditions for success. It also
helps minimize the casualties and costs of protracted or
attritional warfare. Although this is often referred to as the
"Powell Doctrine," it is in fact a classic tenet of military
action. The official history of World War II notes that "the
efficient commander does not seek to use just enough means but an
excess of means. A military force that is just strong enough to
take a position will suffer heavy casualties in doing so; a force
vastly superior to the enemy's will do the job without serious loss
of men."40

Many types of intervention are inherently resistant to this
formula. Peacekeeping, for example, relies on the consent and
cooperation of the local factions in order to succeed. The
peacekeepers themselves cannot guarantee the outcome no matter how
efficient their operations. It is for this reason that peacekeeping
missions can carry on for 20 years on the Golan Heights, 30 years
on Cyprus, or 40 years in India and Pakistan with no conclusion.
This also could become the case in Bosnia, where U.S. forces have
been deployed to a volatile environment without being able to
create the conditions for success. Such interventions should be
avoided, since they offer no control over what return can be
expected from America's military sacrifices. The U.S. should not be
interested in make-work military options in which a "draw" is a
good result.

However, because the U.S. is the world's military superpower,
American forces will be involved in multilateral peacekeeping or
other inconclusive interventions. It is imperative that the U.S.
play only a supporting role in these indecisive multilateral
ventures. The U.S. should promote a sensible division of labor in
multilateral operations; America is not just another power. Using
U.S. leadership in this way will extend American resources and
allow the U.S. to focus on those crises in which the American role
can be both unique and decisive. Faced with all manner of security
crises, both great and small, the U.S. should function much as the
Mayo Clinic does in an unhealthy world: American combat troops
should not make a house call for every case of nighttime heartburn,
but instead should support local doctors as the need arises. More
important, the forces of the U.S. should be committed to those
illnesses that are truly consequential and for which the unique and
decisive capabilities of the American military are most needed and
most effective.

The U.S. also must decide when to work under the rubric of an
international organization, as part of a coalition of the willing,
or on its own. As a rule, if a military intervention is worth
doing, it is worth doing alone. However, operating with the support
and assistance of allies can offer tremendous political and
military advantages. Another factor that must be recognized is the
constraints presented by international organizations. An alliance
such as NATO has the political legitimacy, military authority, and
practiced procedures for mounting and deploying significant
military operations; an organization such as the U.N., however, is
not capable of forming, directing, and employing large military
forces in pursuit of ambitious objectives. It is inhibited by the
constraints inherent in a 185-member voluntary organization. The
U.N. has neither the legitimacy nor the authority that would allow
it the resources and procedures for forming and controlling complex
military operations.

The more complex a military operation becomes, the more it will
require a stringent, rehearsed, and reliable command and control
structure that can be provided only by a practiced alliance
structure or a coalition dominated by a major power. A coalition of
the willing, such as that in the Persian Gulf War, can be a
tremendous success as long as there is a clear unity of effort and
purpose among coalition partners and a legitimate and authoritative
framework for command and control. Any time U.S. combat forces are
involved in coalition operations, the United States should work
either as the lead nation or in a parallel command and control
structure where American troops remain under U.S. command and
control. U.S. troops should never be put under non-U.S. command and
control structures in order to "balance" coalition forces on paper;
they must always have the operational autonomy to succeed through
operations based on American training and doctrine.

CODIFYING A MILITARY INTERVENTION
POLICY

The Administration and Congress should institutionalize these
steps in order to provide strategically sound criteria for military
intervention in the post-Cold War world. The goal should be for
Congress to have some oversight over America's military
interventions without usurping the President's duty to form and
implement a national military strategy. The President should codify
his military intervention policy in a Presidential Decision
Directive similar to PDD-25, but addressing more than multilateral
peace operations. Unfortunately, there is no legal recourse against
a President who insists on making poor strategic decisions.
However, Congress can take steps to redress this problem through
the National Security Strategy. This is a presidential document
required by Section 603 of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Department
Reorganization Act of 1986. In this document, the President is
required to lay out his national security strategy: when, where,
why, and how he intends to use America's armed forces in promoting
the goals of the nation.

Because President Clinton's National Security Strategy has
failed to provide constructive criteria about America's role in the
world and how the U.S. armed forces will support that role,
Congress should consider an amendment to the 1997 defense
authorization bill requiring the President to:

Prioritize national interests and specify national
security interests that the President will support through military
intervention.

Stipulate the criteria, such as the five listed here,
that will be used to discriminate when, whether, where, and how the
U.S. will undertake a military intervention.

Specify the criteria used to decide when and in what
capacity the U.S. will participate in multilateral military
operations through coalitions, alliances, and other multilateral
structures.

State unequivocally that he will consult Congress before
launching military interventions that are not national
emergencies.

Declare that U.S. military forces in interventions
abroad will have clearly defined, decisive, and attainable military
objectives that can be achieved decisively through proven military
doctrine.

CONCLUSION

There is always a measure of political and military risk to
military intervention. However, by establishing workable criteria,
the United States can minimize those risks or, at the very least,
ensure that risks are consistent with costs. The Clinton
Administration has not done well in measuring the value of its
interventions and has persisted in costly and inconclusive
operations on the periphery instead of focusing on America's core
interests. By refusing to prioritize the value of national
interests, the Administration has failed to understand the price,
in magnitude and duration, that the American people are willing to
pay to protect these interests.

Strategic priorities lend clarity and coherency to a national
security strategy that addresses criteria for military
intervention. They also help to allocate America's finite means
among the many different challenges facing the U.S. today. Failing
to match means to ends results in a credibility gap and severely
strained forces, a condition the United States is approaching
today.41

In addition, if a military intervention is worth undertaking,
and is better than other options, it also must be accomplishable.
Thus, the U.S. must set clearly defined and achievable military
objectives that the armed forces can achieve through their proven
operational doctrine. Empty political "signaling" that overrides
military requirements for successful operations is ultimately
self-defeating. Most important, the objectives U.S. military forces
achieve must be able to stand alone as politically decisive; the
U.S. should not be in the business of making strategic gestures
that are transient and easily reversible. Intervention must achieve
a goal that serves the long-term security interests of the United
States.

The U.S. owes it to its armed forces to give them every
conceivable advantage in any intervention. This includes giving
them enough autonomy to create the conditions they will need to
succeed. It also means that when working in a multilateral
framework, U.S. forces should have a unique and decisive role that
makes sense for a global leader with singular capabilities.
Finally, by keeping Congress and the American people involved, the
President can assure that the value of his objective is understood
by all and that the benefits from military intervention are worth
the costs in blood and treasure.

The most complete, readable, and often conflicting recent
treatments of the subject are provided by Richard Haass,
Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the
Post-Cold War World (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment,
1994), and Harry Summers, The New World Strategy: A Military
Policy for America's Future (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1995).

Anthony Lake, "Defining Missions, Setting Deadlines: Meeting
New Security Challenges in the Post-Cold War World," speech at
George Washington University, Washington, D.C., March 6, 1996. Lake
stated that "this is a good time for this discussion," despite the
fact that the Administration already had conducted or initiated
three controversial military interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and
Bosnia -- and has no further military actions on the horizon before
the November 1996 election.

Richard Grimmett, Instances of Use of U.S. Armed Forces
Abroad, 1789-1995, Congressional Research Service, 96-119F,
February 6, 1996.

Speech to U.S. House of Representatives, October 4, 1993,
reprinted in Summers, New World Strategy, p. 191.

U.S. General Accounting Office, Peace Operations: Effect of
Training, Equipment, and Other Factors on Unit Capability,
NSIAD-96-14, October 1995, pp. 28-39.

Robert Gaskin, former Pentagon planner, stated that U.S.
military forces are "approaching burnout." Quoted in Art Pine,
"U.S. Military Highly Rated, But Strains Begin to Show," The Los
Angeles Times, March 19, 1996, p. A7. See also the General
Accounting Office report highlighting the strain on the military,
"Military Readiness: A Clear Policy Is Needed to Guide Management
of Frequently Deployed Units," April 8, 1996. This strain is also
reflected in the "readiness crisis" of 1994. See John Luddy, "The
Truth is Out: The U.S. Military's Looming Readiness Crisis,"
Heritage Foundation F.Y.I. No. 51, February 21, 1995.

Thomas L. Friedman, "The Clinton Gamble," The New York
Times, December 6, 1995, p. A23.

See Stephen Rosen, "Vietnam and the American Theory of Limited
War," International Security, Fall 1982, p. 84.

There are also considerations of cost. The U.S. spent $6.6
billion in incremental costs on Haiti, the former Yugoslavia,
Somalia, and Rwanda from 1992-1995. U.S. General Accounting Office,
Peace Operations: U.S. Costs in Support of Haiti, Former
Yugoslavia, Somalia, and Rwanda, GAO/NSIAD-96-38, March 1996,
p. 2.

Christopher Layne, "Congress in the Age of Peace Enforcement,"
The Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1996.

Harry Summers, "After the Doubts, Salute and Obey," The
Washington Times, December 11, 1995, p. A18. See also Summers,
The New World Strategy, Chapter One.

Professor James Burk, "Public Support for Peacekeeping in
Lebanon and Somalia," paper read at biennial meeting of the
Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, October
20-22, 1995.

Summers, The New World Strategy, p. 45.

Mark Watson, U.S. Army in World War II (Washington,
D.C.: Center for Military History, 1950), quoted in ibid.,
p. 232.

Many have written that the credibility crisis is already upon
the U.S. See Jonathan Clarke, "Rhetoric Before Reality," Foreign
Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 5 (September/October 1995), pp. 2-7.

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